WHAT'S YOUR PROBLEM? NOT GETTING RESULTS? WE CAN HELP.

Lisle woman finally can bury rift with Comcast

Lucy Gaven doesn't have cable television, but for most of the year, she's had a cumbersome Comcast cable line draped across her back yard.

The Lisle resident isn't sure when it was placed there -- sometime in January, she believes -- and she has no clue what it does.

The one thing she's sure of is that her calls to the cable company and to the village of Lisle got her nowhere.

Gaven said she was promised in April, again in June, and finally in July, that the cable would be buried. But it wasn't.

"I think it's kind of absurd that it's still lying on the ground in my back yard," Gaven said last week after contacting What's Your Problem? for help. "I figured maybe you guys could do something to make lawn mowing a less irritating activity for us."

The Problem Solver, no big fan of lawn mowing even without a confounding cable, called Comcast spokeswoman Angelynne Amores early last week. By Friday, crews were at Gaven's home and the home of her neighbor, Lynne Cowell, burying the cable.

Amores said crews would have been there earlier, but there was some confusion at the cable company.

The cable could not be buried earlier than April because the ground was frozen, she said. But after the temperatures rose, the job should have been done quickly, she said.

"We bury miles of lines each year, and the vast majority of them are completed without incident or argument," Amores said. "However, in Ms. Gaven's case, we incorrectly communicated the location of the line, making it difficult for our technical operational team to locate."

Amores said the cable line does not go to anyone's home, but connects one pedestal (a box containing Comcast equipment) to another.

Gaven's neighbor, Cowell, said the work was completed Saturday.

"My husband went out to look at the end result and he can't even tell they put it in," Cowell said, calling the digging, cable burial and landscaping seamless. "It's amazing."

Like Gaven, Cowell said the cable wasn't just unsightly, it was dangerous.

"My boys had caught it in the mower a couple of times," she said. "It was really a problem."

Of course, some problems the neighbors were able to handle on their own. Cowell said that when Comcast laid the cable across her yard in the winter, they left a large coil of unused cable just sitting there. She called a few times for Comcast to pick it up, but it didn't.

"We finally took it and put it in the trash," she said.

Problem solved.

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THE PROBLEM

A Comcast cable appeared in Lucy Gaven's yard, and spent half the year there.

THE SOLUTION

The problem has been deep-sixed.

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